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Jan 05,2019

Why are we raising money for Chinese Artists?

For seventeen years, Red Gate Residency has promoted cultural exchange by hosting international and Chinese artists in Beijing. Now, we want to make it possible to send Chinese artists to our partner artist residency programs around the world, and we need your help. For our 18th year, we aim to raise $18,000 to help fund Chinese artists selected for our international residency exchange programs.

Artist residencies benefit both artists and host communities and have the potential to shape careers. In the case of Liu Shuiyang, his experimentation with paper at the Hudson Center for Contemporary Arts in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2014 established his signature sculptural style. Residencies also have great potential to contribute to the development of young artists, like Lu Hang, who participated in Kooshk Residency in Tehran in summer 2017 as part of Red Gate's bilateral artist exchange. Flowers on a green tablecloth in front of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on TV made him recall the red adornments used in displays by Chinese leaders and inspired a painting on beauty as decoration for power.

Funded residencies open the opportunity to a much greater number of artists who would otherwise not be able to participate, helping to democratize the art community and increase mutual understanding through the person-to-person exchange. Artists, whose sensitivity to the social environment in which they live makes them invaluable contributors to society, are excellent cultural ambassadors. Chinese artists, who come from a society rising rapidly in prominence on the global stage but which only recently opened to the world, have so much to offer their host communities, as well as back home.

Our program partners provide a studio, accomodation and program support. Funds raised will help us contribute to a return airfare, living expenses and art materials. In this way, more artists will be able to apply.1000 dollars will allow us to purchase a roundtrip ticket from China for a single artist. Another 1000 dollars will go towards a stipend which covers cost of living and art supplies. Please note that funds will be allocated according to the individual needs of the artists.